Perhaps. Alternative view: nonsense. Why? Because those “non-medication” recommendations are givens. “No smoking” - duh. I’m not bagging on the list, it’s a good list, nothing wrong. I’m disagreeing that “no medication should be the goal”. Doing the obvious is obvious. What comes after is what’s at stake: the non-obvious, the hard to discern, perhaps even the controversial. It’s why we’re here. It’s the “extra”. Nobody is going to rush to a Longevity Strategies lecture that involves recommendations to breathe and also eat.
Any hope for meaningful extension of healthspan and lifespan by definition goes beyond the default non-intervention physiology. “Ordinary care”, without medication, maximizes the current potential of your body, so yes we assume you already do this, so that’s not what we are asking about. A look at the board clues us in: “rapamycin news”.
The “extra”, the beyond, necessarily involves medication, so it is the exact opposite of a goal of no medication. “No medication” will not get you beyond “ordinary care”. To go beyond, you have to go out on a limb, you must get supra-physiological help, i.e. medication, genetic manipulation, technological enhancement (f.ex. intraocular lens implants to replace deteriorated natural lenses etc.). That should be the goal, because, yes Virginia, there is no alternative. If you want to move faster between point A and point B, optimizing your running is only going to take you so far and so fast, to go faster and further you’ll need to get help beyond your body, a horse, a car, an airplane, a rocket, an intergalactic wormhole transporter. The cult of the “natural” is a resignation to limits and banal irrationality. There is no virtue in “I take no medications” - you may think you’re signalling that you’re healthy, but from my life extension perspective you are signalling that you have proudly given up on any extension, not just trailed behind in the race, but not even entered the race. You are going nowhere, and your “goal” doesn’t interest me.
If you want to extend health and lifespan, medication is not a goal, it is a necessity on the way to the real goal, life extension beyond the “natural” limits and what can be cooked up over the cave fire. To push forward we must climb down from the trees, emerge from the cave, abandon the cult of non-intervention, and wrestle from nature a longer lifespan than randomly befell us through blind evolution. In other news, on this rapamycin news, the search continues.
